


Hostage Negotiations

by Sixthlight



Series: Happy Families [2]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Multi, real toddlers are probably not this tractable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 00:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10842972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Thomas Nightingale is widely regarded as the most dangerous wizard in Europe. Nobody has told my eighteen-month-old daughter this. It shows.





	Hostage Negotiations

 

Thomas Nightingale is regarded, I have been informed by a variety of people, as the most dangerous wizard in Europe – I use this term in the geographical sense, you understand, not the modern political one – and someone who it is best to avoid crossing if at all possible. Varvara Sidorovna once told me that if she’d _known_ he was still alive, running the Folly, and had taken on apprentices, much less that Martin Chorley (then known to us all only as the second Faceless Man) had already come into direct conflict with him, she’d never have taken up the job that landed her in prison in the first place.

“On the other hand,” she’d said, “I dueled with the Nightingale and lived to tell the tale, and how many get to say that?”

Quite a lot of people, actually, since he’s been a police officer and not a soldier for the better part of eighty years now, but she looked so pleased with herself that I didn’t have the heart to point it out.

I even had enough of a bottle of wine once to ask Beverley whether she thought she could take him – purely out of curiosity, since if we ever got to a point where my wife was going toe to toe with my boss-slash-colleague-slash-former teacher of magic-slash-the only person in the world who could reliably persuade my daughter to go to back to sleep if she woke up at three am, my life probably wouldn’t be worth living.

This was the position Beverley had taken when I’d asked her.

“Obviously not _seriously_ ,” I’d said. “But, like, hypothetically. Or if you don’t want to think about you, what about, I dunno, Ty.”

“If it gets to that point then _I’m_ screwed as well,” Beverley had said. “So I also refuse to speculate.”

“You’re no fun.”

“If it makes you feel better,” she’d said, “he wouldn’t have a chance against Mum. There’s a nice straight answer for you.”

“Yeah, but I knew that already.”

“That’s because you’re very intelligent, babes,” she’d said, and kissed me on the forehead. I know when I’m being condescended to.

The point I’m trying to make here is that there are many people who’d turn around and walk away if they knew they were up against Nightingale. There’s a whole other set who just want to be able to say they tried. Antonin Bobet, for example, but also Chorley, in his creepy hierarchical way. That, I really don’t get. (Beverley didn’t ask me, but, in the _most_ hypothetical of circumstances: I’m option C, which is ‘make sure he’s out of the city before he knows you’re having a serious difference of opinion’.)

Then there’s my eighteen-month-old daughter. Nobody’s told her about the most dangerous wizard in Europe thing. It shows.

“I don’t want to criticize,” I said, “but I thought bedtime was an hour ago.”

“No,” said Laura. “ _No_ bed.” She was in her pyjamas, which was a promising sign, but she was also sitting in the middle of the living room, which was not.

“We’re still in negotiations,” said Nightingale, who was sitting on the floor next to her, having ditched his jacket but not his tie. I’d had an early evening call-out to a gruesome but probably not magical murder scene; I’d come home expecting Laura to be in bed and Beverley to be home as well. All I really wanted was a psychologically cleansing shower and to go to bed myself, preferably in that order, but clearly that wasn’t happening.

“No,” Laura added as I sat down with them, just in case her negotiating position was unclear.

“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

Laura chewed on her thumb and stared at me. “No?”

“I put her to bed,” Nightingale said. “Then she got herself up again about ten minutes ago and proceeded to -”

I reached out to try and pick her up, and she let out a wail that would have impressed a banshee. Or I think so: the only one I knew lived in Scotland and wasn’t available to judge.

“Bev?” I asked.

“Held up,” he said. “I don’t know the details.”

“Want mama,” Laura said hopefully. “Mama?”

“You have two perfectly good parents right here,” I told her. “I’m sure we can put you to bed just fine.”

“ _No bed_ ,” she said angrily, her lower lip starting to stick out.

“I thought Fleet said this sort of thing didn’t start until they were two,” Nightingale said.

“She’s very precocious.”

“Quite.”

Here’s the thing with small children: they yell and scream and cry a lot because they have a lot of feelings about their life and very few ways to express any control over it. I can just remember being small – not as small as Laura, but three or four – and the vast feeling of frustration when adults made me do things I didn’t want to do, or be places I didn’t want to be, and I didn’t even know how to say _why_ I didn’t want it. Although that’s assuming anybody was listening. Mostly they weren’t. Mum had a lot on her hands at that point.

In this, small children have a lot in common with people who have committed crimes. They also often feel like they don’t have any other way to express their feelings, although in many cases their feeling is just that they should have a great deal more money than they currently do, or that a person they don’t like shouldn’t exist in the same space as them. They’re also equally bad at telling you what they want without a great deal of persuasion. But toddlers, unlike suspects, have a reasonably good chance at _getting_ what they want if they can get their point across.

Also, they don’t tend to cause grevious bodily harm nearly as much, at least if you live in a country where it’s illegal to leave firearms lying around the place.

So maybe Laura wasn’t tired yet, and maybe she was thirsty, and maybe she thought the shadows under her crib wanted to eat her, and maybe she'd been missing me or her mum, or maybe she was just testing out how far _no_ was going to get her. The trick, like any sort of negotiation, was working out what she wanted, and then if we were prepared to give it to her. Fortunately in this case time was on our side, the same way it would be in any police negotiation: eventually she was going to get sleepy no matter what. She was already knuckling at her eyes.

“Peter?” said Nightingale.

“We need to establish common ground,” I said.

He gave me a long, level look. “This is not a hostage negotiation.”

“Yes it is,” I said. “The rest of our evening is being held hostage.”

He got the very specific look he and Bev both sometimes get when I use metaphors in my parenting, which I choose to take to mean they’re admiring my out-of-the-box thinking.

“Dada?” said Laura, uncertainly.

“Are you thirsty?” I said. “Drink?”

“No,” she said.

“Do you want us to come and sit with you?” suggested Nightingale.

Laura squinted at him and finally said “No,” like she couldn’t think of any other options.

We continued in this vein for about five minutes. She was remarkably consistent in her answers. She could have given any number of people I’d interviewed lessons.

She was occasionally yawning, though, so I held out hope.

“I did investigate one or two of those possibilities,” said Nightingale at one point. “In case you’re wondering.”

“The answers might have changed.”

“True.”

We watched her cautiously as her eyes fluttered shut and she started to slump, but then I ruined it by pushing.

“Bed?” I suggested, and her eyes blinked open.

“NO!”

“Okay, then,” I said, and got up. There were some mild noises of protest but Nightingale managed to calm her down, and I was back in less than a minute anyway with her favourite blanket and the stuffed unicorn Dom and Victor had given her, because they think they’re funny. It was currently her favourite toy to sleep with. I estimated by weight it was about half Laura’s saliva by now, and it was definitely a lot more off-white than it had started. Beverley was planning to sneak it away this weekend for a wash. I didn’t rate her chances but it was good positive thinking. I would have snuck it away and burned it but nobody else in the house agreed with me. 

“Alright,” I said. “Here you go.”

Laura curled a fist into the blanket and blinked at me with wide-eyed suspicion as I sat down again.

“No bed,” she said again, but cautiously.

“That’s right,” said Nightingale, encouragingly. He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. She clutched the unicorn with her other hand and waited for the other shoe to drop. Even toddlers aren’t stupid. Especially not _my_ daughter, obviously.

So I lay down on the floor right there. I hadn’t even taken my jacket off. Laura flopped down to see what I was doing, and Nightingale copied me, obviously trying not to laugh – well obviously for him, anyway.

“No bed for anybody,” I told Laura, and this confused her so much she fell asleep.

Fine, it didn’t go quite that quickly. She huddled up with her unicorn, still watching me suspiciously, and her eyes kept drifting shut and then opening again. Nightingale began to hum, very quietly, a tune I only knew from hearing him sing it to Laura – but he never sang the words when he thought Bev or I were listening. I don’t know why. It sounded like a lullaby, but my French still isn’t good enough for me to translate it as he goes. I keep meaning to record it, but I’ve never got around to it.

Also once Bev saw me trying and took my phone off me, but that’s because she has no proper sense of curiosity.

It did the trick this time too. Her eyes shut, and stayed that way. We stayed where we were on the floor on either side of her.

“This is almost comfortable,” I said quietly, accidentally on purpose tangling my lower legs up with Nightingale’s. 

“I’ve slept on worse,” he said, which wasn’t really agreement, but close enough. Laura started a little, and we hastily pressed our mouths shut. He rested his hand on my waist; with Laura between us it was too far for him to really put his arm around me. We both watched Laura’s breathing slowly even out.

After a little while Nightingale looked at Laura, looked at me, and pointed towards her bedroom upstairs, raising his eyebrows, which meant he wanted to know how I was planning to get her in her crib.

I wiggled my fingers, which is the universal Met signal, among a select group of officers, for _I’m a wizard, duh_. Nightingale’s mouth twitched, and he nodded. It doesn’t bother Bev, of course, but there’s an astonishing range of people who don’t approve of either of us doing magic around, near, and absolutely not _on_ Laura. The most prominent among them is my mother. Luckily for me, she wasn’t here.

We sat up, slowly, and then I gently, gently, _gently_ turned the key in the lock of the universe and lifted Laura up, inch by inch, off the floor. The blanket trailed off her, but she had one chubby fist wound in it and it didn’t slide away. The stuffed unicorn nearly got left behind but Nightingale got his hand under it and it stayed level – I’d been concentrating on Laura. I didn’t try to be fancy; I just got her high enough that I could get my arms under her, and then, gently again, I let her weight settle.

We both held our breath as we crept up the stairs, and there was a nasty moment almost at the top when she sighed and pressed her face into the unicorn, but she stayed asleep all the way into her crib – and while I moved away the chair she’d cunningly used in her escape from it. I didn’t let my breath out, and I don’t think Nightingale did either, until we were halfway down the stairs again.

“Did you get her up there okay?” Bev asked us, and I was so startled I missed the bottom step. Nightingale, a step behind me, employed his somewhat disturbingly quick reflexes to grab me by the back of my jacket, but I had too much momentum and instead we both went forward and basically fell onto Bev where she was standing at the bottom. Because we were both really determined to not wake the baby up again _and_ trained police officers, we managed to keep our mouths shut, so it was just an eerily silent series of thuds and _oofs_. Bev is _not_ a trained police officer, but she is the mother of a toddler, so she just swore a lot very quietly. She stumbled sideways into the wall when I cannoned into her and I grabbed at her to try and keep upright, so we didn’t all go straight to the floor – it was more a slow crumple once we all realised we were most of the way there and it was the least painful option.

It could have been worse. Bev could have been in her wetsuit and not jeans and a t-shirt. There's nothing like full-body contact with someone in cold wet neoprene to end your day poorly, even if that someone _is_ your lovely wife.

Then we all lay there and waited in dread for Laura to wake up. Bev was sitting against the wall next to the bottom of the stairs, I basically had my head in her lap and, less comfortably, her knee in my sternum, and Nightingale was mostly on top of me. He’s not what you’d call broad-built but he _is_ basically my height, and I’m prone to banging my head on the occasional doorway in older houses. It wasn’t comfortable.

“Get _off,_ you two,” hissed Bev, somehow getting her knee into an even less comfortable position for me.

“Can’t,” I hissed back.

“Don’t whisper, it carries,” said Nightingale in low and non-carrying tones as he climbed off me, which I know he knew that we knew, but to be fair he’d spent the longest of any of us this evening trying to get Laura to sleep.

“When did you get in?” I asked Bev, quietly but not whispering, as I sat up.

“When you were all lying on the living room floor,” she said, rubbing at her knee like I’d somehow bruised it with my chest rather than the other way around. “You’re lucky I didn’t take a photo.”

“You were very quiet,” Nightingale said, approvingly, helping me up. He’s very good at sneaking around when he feels like it and he expects everybody else to be, too. I think it’s all those decades of living with Molly, who I’ve never managed to hear coming even when I’m watching for her.

“Neither of you were paying any attention,” Bev told him. “She didn’t want to go to bed, did she? They said she didn’t take her nap today, I bet that’s why.”

“I don’t think so, actually,” Nightingale said. “She was sleepy enough; she just didn’t like being left in her crib, for some reason.”

“I think she was just experimenting with the power of the word _no_ ,” I said. There was a noise from upstairs, and we all froze, Nightingale’s hand tightening around my upper arm, but it was just the house settling. Or perhaps a poltergeist, but no ghost would dare, not in the home of one of Mama Thames’ daughters.

I kissed Bev, to demonstrate that I was in fact pleased to see her. After a long day, it was good to have all my family at home.

“C’mon, kitchen,” she said, poking me in the ribs, but she squeezed the back of my neck with her other hand as she pulled away.

“Let’s,” agreed Nightingale, and we all tiptoed away.

*

Laura woke up at two am all the same, but we volunteered Bev to deal with it. It was definitely her turn.

*.

**Author's Note:**

> I still don't know anything about babies. Sorry.


End file.
